


Hotel

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, because why not?, hotel au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:15:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3109115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because I am pretty sure we have not had deskclerk!Myka and businesstraveler!HG, and I was feeling all holiday-happy (though this is not holiday-related): here is that kind of sweet thing. Ugh, these two are the cutest and sweetest--and I hope I have done them some justice here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Myka’s shift at the hotel desk, her four-days-a-week shift, starts at 6pm and lasts until 4am. Evening rush is crazy; she knows when particular flights arrive at the airport because the shuttles are packed. She moves so quickly that she looks people in the face only to confirm that they are indeed the person depicted on their driver’s licenses or passports or whatever identification they provide. It’s mostly driver’s licenses, though, so when she sees a passport, she tends to look more closely. Passports mean travelers from far more interesting places. Not that Myka has time to talk to anyone about that. Not that Myka is supposed to talk to anyone about that kind of thing, either; the clerks are to be friendly but not too friendly; helpful but not too helpful. The guests must enjoy their stay… but a desk clerk is not a friend.

In the almost-morning hours, people sometimes forget that. A guest will stand at the desk long after he—usually he—has been checked in. His loneliness will radiate from him, and while Myka will feel sorry for him, for she is as compassionate as the next person—and she knows that life is lonely, and a traveler’s life is lonelier still—she will encourage him, as gently as possible, to go and get some sleep. Because he’s got a meeting, or a presentation, or something like that, when daylight comes, hasn’t he? Usually he’ll agree. And Myka will be alone again, and she’ll go back to reading an article that her advisor told her would be useful, or she’ll try to write a section for the chapter she’s supposed to be writing. She’s starting to wonder if she’ll ever finish writing her dissertation, starting to wonder if her life will always be backwards like this, with her night spent at a desk and her days spent either reading or in bed, asleep. Not that she sleeps all that well, backwards.

She does this job because usually, from about midnight until four, things are mostly quiet. The occasional emergency takes over… but it is mostly quiet, and Myka reads, or she writes, and she wishes she had a plan for her life other than “finish PhD in literature and then I guess become an itinerant instructor who never gets tenure.” When the wishing becomes too strong, she opens a new document on her laptop and writes a long, funny email to the first person she can think of (usually her sister, Tracy), describing the latest disaster at the hotel. Plumbing catastrophes alone could keep her in material for years if she ever decides to become a standup comic…

One evening during the rush, she is processing check-ins as quickly as she can; the flight from Miami has just arrived, which she knows because guests walk in shivering and blowing on their hands and trying to joke about the temperature: it is the first real cold snap of fall. You sure keep it cold, don’t you? they ask, and Myka agrees that yes, yes they do. She finishes uttering perhaps her fiftieth variation on that when the next guest moves to the front of the line. She’s pleased to hear, from that guest, a British accent; at least “you sure keep it cold” will be said differently by this voice, by this lovely British voice. By this lovely British woman’s voice, and she is lovely in face as well as in voice; Myka lingers for a moment, as she should not do, as she compares the passport to the person who wields it. “You’re in room 815, Ms. Wells. Take one of these elevators to the right.” Myka hands over passport and key cards; the interaction is coming to an end. She tries not to sigh as she considers moving on to the next person. “Thank you for choosing The Grover Hill Inn. Enjoy your stay,” Myka says, as she always does. She has received the gamut of responses to this, from curt to voluble, polite to astonishingly rude.

From Ms. Helena Wells, she receives a half-smile and a “no, thank _you_.” It is conventional; Myka should dismiss it from her consciousness immediately and move on to the next guest. But her eyes linger on a head of dark hair, and she replays the word “you.”

Two weeks later, Helena Wells checks in again; it is the evening rush again, and Myka experiences her face and her voice as a respite from the crowd. Myka wonders why Helena Wells is here, what her business is… she could try to look it up, under the pretense of familiarizing herself with guest preferences, but it seems an invasion of privacy. There’s no real privacy in a hotel, she knows. But still… when their interaction comes to an end this time, Myka gives her “returning guest” speech: “Thank you for choosing The Grover Hill Inn again, Ms. Wells. It’s nice to see you back. Enjoy your stay.”

“Thank _you_ , Ms. Bering,” says Helena Wells. And her eyes had not dropped to Myka’s nametag before she spoke… Myka is warmed by the idea that she took note at some earlier point, so she could be polite about it. Myka thinks that Helena Wells must work in some customer-facing job. Names and when to use them… but then she is watching that dark hair again, this time as it heads to room 1208.

And again in two weeks: Helena Wells, with her accent and her passport and her “thank _you_.” Looking at her and listening to her is again an oasis for Myka; there are other repeat guests, and Myka does know their names, their faces, their preferences—wakeup call at 6am as always, yes sir; of course, ma’am, we’ll expedite the dry-cleaning just like last time—but Helena Wells doesn’t make any requests at check-in, doesn’t call the desk during her stay… her stay of two days, two weekdays, Thursday and Friday, then she checks out on Saturday morning, but Myka is never on the desk when she checks out, which has each time happened at 5:30am.

Myka does not know what possesses her: after Helena Wells says “thank _you_ , Ms. Bering” and begins to turn away, Myka says, “If there’s anything you need…”

Helena Wells turns back around. She smiles. She says, “I’ll let you know.”

Myka replays those words, just as she always does the emphasized “you.” She replays those words as she is trying to and failing to go to sleep after her shift, replays them and watches the movement of Helena Wells’s face and hair as she says them.

She knows there is something wrong in this, so she tries to explain it: all right, yes, Helena Wells is attractive. Myka sees all kinds of people, attractive and unattractive. That shouldn’t matter. So: it’s because she’s different. That must be it. She is a passport instead of a driver’s license, she is a British accent, she is polite and lovely and… and all right, Myka has seen her three times, and all right. That is enough times to recognize that the way her blood jumps at the sight of that dark hair means that she finds Helena Wells _physically_ attractive. Myka doesn’t find a lot of people physically attractive. She just doesn’t. So that is what it is. It isn’t just that Helena Wells _is attractive_ ; it’s that Myka is _attracted to_ her. That’s fine. That explains everything, and now that it’s explained, Myka can _take it easy_.

And so, a fourth time: it is one more time, one more time that Myka says, “If there’s anything you need…”, one more time that Helena Wells blinks and smiles and says, “I’ll let you know.” Yes, it is physical attraction. Myka feels her body move in response to Helena Wells’s presence, and she knows now, so she can discard the response, now, as explained. Explained away.

So if everything is explained, then what explains the surge of… pain? is that what it is?…that Myka feels when Helena Wells checks in again, for a fifth time, in the company of a man. Myka chokes when she tries to add those extra “anything you need” words, but Helena Wells seems to be waiting for them, as if it is a play and that is Myka’s line and it is her own cue without which she cannot proceed. “If there’s—” Myka starts.

“If you could arrange for a particularly lumpy mattress on one of the beds in the room,” Helena Wells says, and she jerks her head toward the man with her. “For my brother.”

“My internal hilarity knows no bounds,” says the man, with clear affection.

They are lingering at the desk, and it is still the rush; there are at least five people in line behind them, and yet Myka’s sagging, shapeless relief is unmanageable. It keeps her from indicating, or even believing, that they should move along.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Myka says. “Although officially none of our mattresses have lumps.”

Helena Wells smiles. “It’s true that I am always very comfortable here.”

And that shouldn’t make Myka feel good, or complimented, or warm, or any of the other things it makes her feel.

Two weeks later, Helena Wells does not appear during the evening rush. Myka is devastated, which is ridiculous. She tries to tell herself how ridiculous it is. Some business traveler is no longer traveling to one place she used to do business. This is what happens. Business travelers travel everywhere, not just here. Everywhere.

It is 2:30am. Myka is reading. She was trying to write, earlier, but she was distracted. Thinking about Helena Wells? Thinking about how Helena Wells is not here, but should be? It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. It doesn’t matter. So now she is reading. A theorist, one who will be very important for her dissertation. Probably. She is pretty sure. She is concentrating, really she is; and not on something that is legible as disappointment.

And because what she has been feeling so far tonight is not disappointment, then what she feels, when she sees a woman with dark hair sprinkled with new snow walk through the revolving doors, is not jubilation, or joy, or any other emotion of that nature. It is not that.

That dark head is being shaken, like an animal’s, shaken to rid it of that snow. Myka is ignoring how much she wants to be the one to brush the snow from that hair, to then take a towel and dry it gently. “I missed a plane,” Helena Wells says. “I had to fly into the other airport, rent a car, and drive.” She sweeps more snowflakes from her shoulders. Then she looks up at Myka. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

If she had meant that… oh, if she only could have meant that. “The hotel… it’ll always be here. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” She looks at Myka. “I look forward to seeing you. A familiar face. I know we don’t know each other, not really, but I… well.” She opens her shoulder bag, presumably to get out her passport.

Her hands are pink, chapped. They must be cold. She should be in her room, cranking the heat, not standing here at the chilly desk. “I don’t need your passport,” Myka says. “If you aren’t Helena Wells, you’re doing a pretty amazing impression of her. I think you should be rewarded with a hotel room.”

Helena Wells smiles. “How’s the mattress?”

Myka has never been a flirt, has never known what to say when flirting. But she knows that if she did know how to flirt, she would be tossing off some suggestive remark right now. She doesn’t know how to do that, but she wishes she did, because if she did… instead, she says, “Probably better than the one we gave your brother last time.”

“Just ‘probably’? Do you not know for certain?” And Myka is sure that she is being flirted with, now. She is sure. And she cannot do a thing about it.

“I’ll just check you in, so you can go upstairs and get warm.”

“What are you reading?”

“What?”

“Your book.”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to concentrate tonight.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired. I don’t know.” The keys are ready now; she will have to hand them off, send Helena Wells to her room, go back to her book—though it might be easier to concentrate now, now that Helena… Helena _Wells_ , she admonishes… is here, is safe, isn’t gone forever. It will be fine now. Yes, fine.

“I’m tired too,” Helena says. “Will I see you again? This trip?”

“I don’t think so. I’m never on when you check out.”

“What time would I have to check out, then? To see you?”

“I’m off at four. That’s way too early. You check out at five-thirty.”

“You know when I check out?”

“Guest preferences,” Myka says.

“Hm. I suppose you do need to know what your guests… prefer.”

“Not like that.” It feels very important that Helena know that Myka did not mean it like that.

Helena smiles. “I hope not.”

“You should get some sleep,” Myka says.

“Will you?”

“I’m off at four, I told you. I’ll sleep then.” In response, Helena yawns, and Myka yawns back. “Don’t make me do that,” she says. “Here are your keys. Go to sleep, Ms. Wells.”

“Helena. A conversation at 2:30 in the morning? First-name basis, yes?”

“Helena,” Myka says. “I’m Myka.”

“You’re beautiful, Myka,” Helena says, then laughs. “Did I say that out loud? I’m more tired than I thought; I’ve lost my filter.”

Myka wants to say, please lose your filter more, always, and also come around this desk right now and let me touch you… but those are words she can never say, so that is a thought she must pretend that she did not have. She has to get out of this before something happens… so she reverts to the script: “Thank you for choosing The Grover Hill Inn again, Ms. Wells. It’s nice to see you back. Enjoy your stay.”

“I’d enjoy it more if I could see you again.”

And Myka wonders what it is about the middle of the night that makes people say things, because she says, “I would too. But I can’t.”

“What about tomorrow night?”

“What about it?”

“Won’t you be here, reading?”

“Probably,” Myka admits. “Unless there’s an emergency.”

“All right then,” Helena says. “Perhaps I’ll enjoy my stay after all.”

Myka wants to say “stop flirting with me.” She wants to say “stop distracting me.” But she doesn’t want to say either of those things, either. Instead, she says, “I guess we’ll see.”

****

Helena appears at the desk the next night, very late, when it is the true night shift, when Myka is alone. It is no trouble for Myka to follow the management-mandated rule: smile at ten feet, verbal greeting at five feet. All staff, when they encounter guests, are to follow that rule. Myka sees Helena coming, though; she smiles at twenty feet and keeps smiling. Verbal greeting at a little less than five feet, if she is being honest, because it is the middle of the night and the lobby is silent. She says a quiet “hi,” to which Helena responds with a low “hello.”

Myka should suggest that she go away, go to sleep; guests should not be encouraged to hang around the desk. If her supervisor were to put in a surprise appearance… but that probably won’t happen. That probably won’t happen, and a beautiful woman is asking Myka once again what she is reading. So Myka tells her, tells her about her work, her dissertation… and Helena asks the right questions; she is smart, so smart, and how anyone can be so smart and so beautiful at the same time, Myka doesn’t know, but she gathers her courage and asks Helena what keeps bringing her to the hotel, what her business is in this Midwestern city that is so cold so much of the year.

“I’m buying a company,” Helena says. “Rather, my family’s corporation is.”

“Is that why your brother came last time?”

Helena nods. “He doesn’t fully trust me.”

“That seems… old-fashioned.”

“It’s fair. I don’t fully trust him either. Do you have siblings?”

“A sister.”

“And would you believe her if she said she had sorted a multi-million-dollar deal?”

“Not if she said she’d sorted a five-dollar donation to Goodwill.”

Helena laughs. “Myka…” she says. “I like your name very much.”

“I like yours too,” Myka says, and even to her own ears, she sounds hungry. “I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this at all.”

“Here in the hotel, you mean,” she says, and Myka nods. “Then let me take you somewhere that isn’t the hotel. Right? Then it won’t matter what we say to each other.”

They are separated by the desk. Helena is someone who comes to town every two weeks; her family’s corporation is making a million-dollar deal to buy a company. Myka is a graduate student who makes slightly above minimum wage who has been fantasizing—confess it, own it—fantasizing about someone she does not know, and now that she knows her just the tiniest bit better, wants her even more… but this is wrong. This is exactly why the hotel has the rules it does about staff and guests, to keep a minimum-wage desk clerk from getting confused about someone who does multi-million-dollar business deals. “No,” Myka says. “I can’t. It’s against the rules.”

“But I like you.”

“I like you too. But I need this job.”

“All right,” Helena says. “All right.” She turns to go. Then she turns back. “I’ve been so busy; I haven’t met anyone in… a long time. I thought I just hadn’t had the time. I expected things to continue like that until… I don’t know. Until something was different.” She laughs gently. Myka is beginning to understand that she laughs when she’s nervous, when she doesn’t quite know what to say next, or doesn’t quite want to say what she’s going to say next. “But I’m sure you meet all sorts of people. Some of them very like me, I expect. Who say all kinds of things to you that they shouldn’t.”

Myka had been thinking, earlier in the evening: It’s just that I’ve been busy, and I haven’t had time to meet anyone, so I am thinking thoughts about someone unattainable. It’ll just go on like that until someday things are different, and then I’ll meet someone real. You have not met someone now, she tries to tell herself. A hotel guest is not _someone_. _Someone_ is another grad student, or a person in a bar, or maybe some supposedly perfect match conjured up by some online service. That is how you meet _someone_. “You’re right,” she says. “All sorts of people. All sorts of people who say all sorts of things… a desk clerk’s not quite a bartender, but close.”

“If it matters at all, I’m not in the habit. Desk clerks or bartenders.”

“It matters,” Myka says. “But rules are rules.”

Helena nods. “I want you to keep your job. We’ll see about the rules.” She nods again. “I’ll see you in two weeks, how’s that?”

“Okay,” Myka says. She had been hoping that, despite what she’d said, Helena would appear the next night, or that she would check out early when she left, that Myka could just have more time to look at her. Just to look. She wanted to touch, but she would settle for looking. And yet she doesn’t see Helena again. There is no opportunity.

Two weeks. She keeps calm, goes to work, reads articles, adds to her draft of her next chapter. _If I am good, this will somehow go well._ Magical thinking, but what else does she have? More snow falls. The temperature drops further. Hotel guests’ cars refuse to start; the service-truck drivers the hotel contracts with to heat engine blocks and provide jumps rub their hands to keep them warm, but also in anticipation of how much money they’ll soon be holding.

The evening rush on Wednesday starts, roars—you sure keep it cold, don’t you; yes, we do—then trails off. No sign of Helena. Myka checks the airports for late flights, for cancelled flights. She does not know where Helena flies in from. Then she thinks to check the reservations.

There is nothing in the system for Helena Wells.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to cliff-hang this mildly, like I did over on tumblr, but eh... here's part two in just a second. Because they are so precious, so why not.


	2. Chapter 2

Myka waits through the rest of her shift. She had been so excited to come to work tonight… so excited to see this woman that she could never, would never, have. And what, exactly, had she been thinking would happen? What, exactly? A slow-motion run across the lobby toward each other, maybe? Some forbidden “come up to my room later” exchange?

Okay, yes. Yes, something like that. Because something like that is the only way this crazy thing, this thing that is not even a thing, could continue. So it should be fine, just fine, to think it through in the realm of impossible fantasy.

At 4am, Myka tidies the coffee area, counts her bank, rechecks all the wakeup-call requests, and initials the log. She hands off to Karim, who is in the undergraduate hospitality management program and will most likely be buying this hotel and the rest of its chain someday. He _loves_ the hotel. He loves _all_ hotels. Myka envies him his certainty, though not its particular focus.

She bundles up: extra cardigan over her black-vest-and-tie uniform, hat, gloves, scarf, enormous down coat; and she hopes her car will start, because at this point waiting for the engine block to heat would be too much. She wants to be at home in bed, maybe drinking something warm, maybe just giving up and sleeping.

She should be using the service entrance, off to the side, but the front lobby is actually closer to her car. On a night—or a morning—like this one, she’s okay with taking the liberty of leaving through the front door.

As she enters the revolving door, she sees someone rush to enter its opposite side. Someone with long, dark hair. Someone who is insufficiently dressed for the weather—her boots have heels and are ridiculously wrong for snow, and her coat is far more fashion than function. Someone beautiful… someone who is a breathless and cold Helena Wells. Myka stands outside the lobby, under the portico, and looks at her back, looks at the fall of hair that is Helena Wells, standing inside. Myka feels her beauty as physical damage: she might as well have picked up a knife and started slicing into Myka.

Helena turns around and sees Myka; she moves toward the door, as if to come outside again. Myka runs to preempt her, pushes through the rotation, and then, suddenly, they are standing together in the hotel lobby. They have stood this close to each other, before… but always separated by the desk. There is no barrier between them now, and Helena looks so cold. Myka wants to fuss over Helena with her hands, pull Helena’s coat more tightly around her, see to her gloves, offer her own hat and scarf and put them on Helena herself. “Why are you so late?” she asks. “Are you all right? Come on, let Karim check you in. Your reservation must have been dropped somehow, but we’ll find you a room.”

“Myka,” she says. “I don’t have a reservation. I’m staying at the Evergreen, across town.”

“Why would you do that? That place is terrible!”

“Why would I do that? Because I don’t want to invite any of their desk clerks to come to breakfast with me.”

“Because you… what?”

“I told you we’d see about the rules. That isn’t breaking them, is it? If a guest of a different hotel takes you to breakfast?”

Myka wants to kiss her. Standing right here in the lobby, at ten after four in the morning, she wants to pull Helena Wells’s body close and kiss her and never stop…

Instead, they go to Denny’s, because it is the only place open at such an ungodly hour. As they’re being seated, Myka’s face burns, from the cold wind and the snow and from embarrassment. She is sure that everyone in the place is assuming they’ve been doing what she _wishes_ they’d been doing, and if they aren’t assuming, then they’re reading her mind and seeing that wish swimming its way repeatedly to the surface.

Myka is content to ask questions, to watch and listen as Helena does most of the talking: she usually flies in from Philadelphia; that is where she spends most of her time; her family runs a holding company that is in pharmaceutical development and distribution; the company they are buying is run by two professors at the university; the deal is difficult because of citizenships, nationalities, countries of incorporation. “Not to mention, they have no idea how to run a company,” she says, and she is talking about how much time she is spending simply trying to make this company into a _company_. Myka is trying to pay attention—she _wants_ to pay attention—but she is distracted by being so close to Helena, separated by the table in a booth, which is not so different from the hotel’s front desk, width-wise, but is completely different in that their legs can touch under it. Accidentally.

When the waiter brings their check, Helena tries to take it and pay, but Myka tells her no, please, I really don’t want it to be… like that. She isn’t quite sure what she means, but it has something to do with minimum wage set against multimillions of dollars. By the time they get to the parking lot, however, Myka is second-guessing herself, because Helena looks… hurt? Not quite hurt, but maybe disappointed, and Myka wonders if her wanting to pay her own way has somehow indicated that she’s not interested—but then she’s admonishing herself for thinking that this is about that kind of interest in the first place—but then again, what else would it be about? Maybe she should just try and see what happens… she realizes at the very last second that Helena is, seemingly, trying too.

They almost collide with each other; Myka’s coat is so bulky that she couldn’t get very close even if she wanted to, which she does, but she doesn’t know what Helena really wants, so she is trying not to be aggressive about it, which makes her get the angle completely wrong, so their mouths don’t meet. Instead, they seem to carom off the icy molecules of air, the chilly visible breaths, that separate them.

A missed kiss: it’s their entire relationship that isn’t, that shouldn’t be. Myka starts to say just “thank you” before trying to escape, but she looks once more into Helena’s face. The idea that someone who looks like this came to see her at four in the morning in the dead of winter—and is staying in a terrible hotel, when she clearly is accustomed to the best, the most expensive—that idea is unprecedented. So Myka tries again.

Helena is trying again too, and they almost miss again, but this time, their frozen mouths connect, and while it’s too cold to technically be romantic in any grand sense—Myka’s nose is running, and she can’t quite feel _all_ of her lips—it is good enough and sweet enough and it is the kind of kiss that if they were not in a snowy Denny’s parking lot…

Helena says, “I can barely feel my lips. I think that’s your doing.”

“I have never wanted anyone more than I want you right this minute,” is what Myka wishes she had the courage to say. Instead she shakes her head. “Not unless you did the same thing to me.”

“Maybe I did,” is the answer she gets, and oh _god_ this woman is going to kill her. Helena goes on, less playfully, “Could we do this again tomorrow? Breakfast, I mean.”

So they do. This time Myka does more of the talking, and Helena seems genuinely interested, despite Myka’s hesitancy with regard to what shape her life is supposed to take next.

“If there had been no family business,” Helena declares, “I’m sure I would be trying to find my way, exactly as you are.” She smiles. “Or perhaps not exactly. I’m certainly no philosopher, so the significance of formulations of the sublime in the eighteenth century? Straight over my head.”

“I doubt that,” Myka says. “I don’t think much goes over your head.” But Myka is realizing—she could have looked more closely at the birthdate on Helena’s passport, but her attention had been elsewhere—that Helena is not as much older than Myka as her multimillion-dollar family business makes her seem.

After breakfast, they kiss in the parking lot again… Myka _loves_ this parking lot now… and they are much better able to find each other’s lips this time. More than once, in fact, in spite of the cold. “You taste like pancakes. And maple syrup,” Myka says, and kisses her again.

Helena says, “You taste like your entire Grand Slam breakfast. You also taste like I want to see you two weeks from now. May I?”

“God, yes,” Myka says, before she can think better of it. Then she says, “But you have to stay at the hotel. That Evergreen place is a disaster. Karim said they offered him a management internship, and it was so bad he decided he was better off clerking at the Grover.”

“But I want to _see you_.”

“We can come here. It’ll be okay.” She thinks that is probably true. No one will know. And besides, it’s better that the Grover keeps Helena’s business, anyway. That’s what Myka will say if anyone sees them.

****

In the middle of the night on Saturday, she writes her sister a long email about cold and snow and tow trucks. After some internal debate, she adds one line to the end: “P.S. I’m in love.”

Tracy immediately sends back a list of women: Myka’s friends from high school, college, and grad school, plus several professors’ names and three of Myka’s fellow hotel employees. “This is everyone you know,” she adds. “Highlight the person it is.”

Myka writes back: “What if I met somebody new?”

Tracy responds: “You never meet anybody new. On purpose, you never meet anybody new.”

“I meet new people every day.”

“You mean in your job? That’s not meeting new people. Do grocery checkers meet new people every day? Do waiters?”

“If their customers or diners or whoever come back over and over. If they talk to them. If they go to Denny’s for breakfast with them.”

“Breakfast. Right.” Myka can practically hear the deadpan tone in Tracy’s typing.

“Not like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a date.”

“You went on a breakfast date to Denny’s. With a hotel guest.”

“Twice. But she wasn’t a hotel guest when I did that.”

“I’m confused.”

“You think _you’re_ confused? I’m the one who’s in love with somebody who comes to town every two weeks and stays for only two days.”

“Are you making this up?”

“Of course not!”

“Then I want proof.”

Myka sends Tracy a link to the Wells family’s corporate website. There’s a picture of Helena there; Myka found it after Helena talked about the company during their first breakfast.

Myka’s phone rings. She and Tracy have a long discussion about what it means that Myka is in love with someone who is on a Board of Directors. Someone who is on a Board of Directors and looks like _that_. And is also actually into Myka? And Myka isn’t… well, isn’t kidding herself on that point? “I don’t care if I am,” Myka says. And Tracy concedes that for someone that good-looking, she might not care either… “so you’re just going to go with it?” she asks, with some skepticism. Myka says yes. She is just going to go with it.

****

Myka sees—because she has been checking obsessively—that on Monday, there is a reservation for Helena Wells in the system. The reservation is for nine days from now, her usual Wednesday arrival time. Myka tries to do what she did before: work hard, keep her head down, let her thoughts wander only at specified times, within rigid parameters.

And finally, Wednesday comes. The evening’s rush feels like nothing at all, not compared to what is happening to Myka’s nerves. Guests say it’s cold; she laughs and says it could be worse. They want wakeup calls, extra towels, late checkout times, everything under the sun, but it all slides right by, right until she’s handed a passport, the bearer of which asks, in response to Myka’s very formal greeting, “How are the mattresses this time around?”

Myka sticks to the script as she checks Helena in. This makes Helena keep trying even harder to make her break, but it doesn’t work, and Myka can see Helena becoming comically frustrated. Myka says, right as Helena is about to turn around in a fake huff, “If there’s anything you need…”

“Yes there is. A breakfast meeting, let’s call it. Would you be willing to… help me arrange that?”

Myka nods. This entire time she has barely been able to keep her feet on the floor; she wants to launch herself over the desk to get at Helena.

Helena texts “meet you there?” to Myka at 3:45 in the morning, and Myka breaks all speed records closing out and handing off to Karim, who pretends to be confused as he asks her where the fire is. Then he laughs and says, “Tell her hi for me.”

“Tell who hi?”

Karim makes a kissing face. “Your _girlfriend_. Like I didn’t see you two last time she was here?”

“You won’t tell?”

“Myka,” Karim says, “I think anyone who _actually_ intends to work in the hospitality industry, as you _don’t_ , will tell you that there is inevitably going to be a certain amount of… interaction. So go with god, my child.”

He’s nineteen years old. He’s nineteen years old, and Myka is in his debt.

****

She and Helena kiss hello, before they go in. They both say, “I missed you.” They sit beside each other in the booth now, instead of across the table, so they can be closer, so they can touch.

And, just like two weeks ago, they do the same thing the next day as they did the day before, and this time it is nonstop kisses for hello, practically in each other’s laps while they eat, nearly climbing into each other’s coats to kiss goodbye.

“And I’ll see you in two weeks?” Myka asks. She is breathless from the cold, from Helena, from everything; everything they do is more fervent, more passionate. She wants Helena to drop everything and come home with her right now, so they can have twenty-four hours before she gets back on a plane… but she knows Helena is here for only two days, that she is here for a reason, and that the reason does take up her time. She had yawned this morning all through breakfast because of a dinner that ran into the wee hours, and they are to start again at eight this morning. “Those scientists,” she had said ruefully, “certainly do like to hear themselves talk. But we’re getting somewhere, I think. Perhaps. We had better, or Charles is going to start looking over my shoulder again, I just know it.”

“Do you look over his?”

“Of course I do. He’s been trying to convince two companies in London to merge, so that we can then purchase the result. At it for almost eight months now. The last time I went with him, I was tempted to say we should swap.” Then she had smiled. “But I’d so much rather work on this. After all, there’s no you in London.”

“I hope not,” Myka had said. “I really, really hope not.”

It’s only once they’ve parted that she realizes: Helena did not answer her question of whether she would be back in two weeks. Myka thinks about calling, thinks about texting. Thinks, then, that it would probably be a mistake to try to cling to Helena too tightly. Thinks that she should just _go with it_ , as Tracy said.

****

Saturday morning, four o’clock. She has handed off to Karim and is about to step out the service door at the back of the hotel, when she feels her phone buzz in her pocket. She takes off her glove, digs under her coat—this is Tracy, she just knows it, because only her sister has this kind of timing—and reads the text: “Emergency upstairs, room 1205”. Her heart starts hammering doubletime, because the text is from Helena, and that is Helena’s room, and Helena will not be checking out of her room for another hour and a half. And if Myka goes up there now… but she is trying to _go with it_. “Be right there” she texts back.

No one sees her as she takes the elevator up. She wants to call Karim and tell him to erase the security tapes… she tries to keep thinking about that as she walks through the twelfth-floor hall; she wants to have something to occupy her mind as she stands in front of 1205, working up the nerve to knock.

Her nerve is still under construction when Helena, wearing a hotel robe, opens the door, glances this way, that way, and swings Myka around into the room. She stands and stares at Myka as she lets the door close behind her—but right before it does, she yelps “forgot!”, grabs the Do Not Disturb sign, and loops it over the outside handle. Then she pushes the door closed with a decisive click.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Myka tells her. “Housekeeping certainly won’t be coming around before five-thirty.”

“Except,” Helena says, “I’m not checking out at five-thirty—well, not five-thirty _today_.”

“What?”

“I’m staying till tomorrow. It’s a surprise.” She puts her arms around Myka’s scarf-clad neck.

“I thought it was an emergency,” Myka says. She is now feeling _very_ warm in all her winter gear.

“It’s that too. But only if you want it to be.”

Myka pretends to consider. “I guess we’ve been on four dates. That’s probably enough, right?”

“Five. I came to visit you at the desk once—that was our first date.”

“That wasn’t a date. Nobody kissed anybody.”

“Well, I would have.”

“So would I,” Myka sighs.

“Then I think it _was_ a date. So that’s five. And I think if everyone involved agrees that _four_ dates is enough to get to know each other, and it turns out to have been five? I think you should take your coat off.” So Myka does that. And her hat and her scarf and her gloves. “Thank you,” Helena tells her, very seriously. “And now I would very much like to start getting you out of this vest.” One by one, plied by Helena’s fingers, the buttons leave their buttonholes, until the vest is hanging open. “And now I intend to start untying this tie… as uniforms go, it’s very becoming, but someday soon, I would love to see you wearing something else.”

“I want to see you wearing nothing at all,” Myka says, because it is true.

“Oh, that’s easy. Get me out of this robe, why don’t you?” Helena tells her.

How often does anyone get to live out a fantasy? If that is all this is, Myka tries to tell herself, it will be enough… but the thought puts enough of a stutter into her movements, as she unbelts the robe and begins to get at Helena’s skin, to make Helena try to guess at her worry. “We’ll be fine. You won’t be fired. And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about doing exactly this. Exactly here, in the hotel.” She laughs. “Because I have. For weeks and weeks. When you ask me if there’s anything I need? Oh, Myka, you have no idea what I’ve wanted to tell you I need from you.” She takes Myka’s hands in hers, then guides them to her body. “But why don’t I show you instead.”

****

Hours and hours later, Myka is exhausted and sore and thinking that fantasies are just fine, far better than fine, and she will take as much of this as Helena is willing to give. Once every two weeks? If that is what she can have, she will offer up thanks for it; she will go with it and worry about the future, the long-term future, later. Right now, Helena has her head on Myka’s shoulder, and the near future is that Myka will stroke her fingers along Helena’s upper arm. And that she will do it again.

But she is exhausted. And exhaustion is like the middle of the night: it makes people say things. And so these words emerge: “I told my sister I’m in love with you.”

Helena slides her legs against Myka’s. “You told your sister before you told me?”

“Well… she’s a good check on whether I’m really losing my mind.” Myka moves her hand again. “Which I am, by the way.”

“That’s all right,” Helena says. “I talked to Charles about you, too.”

“And what did he say?

“That I sounded unhappy.”

But she doesn’t sound unhappy to have been told that. “Are you?” Myka asks.

Helena laughs that quiet, revealing laugh. “Well, I was away from you at the time. So, yes. Then.”

****

On a Saturday morning in early March, Myka lets herself into her apartment after her shift. It’s four-thirty in the morning. She washes her face, changes into a T-shirt, flannel pajama pants—it’s closing in on spring, but not yet any kind of warm—and slides into bed.

“I thought you’d never get here,” says Helena as Myka nestles in behind her. Her voice is still almost all sleep.

“It’s the normal time,” Myka says.

“I hate that it’s the normal time. I’ll have to leave in not too long to catch my flight.”

“I know. I don’t like it any more than you do. But I do like that you stay here now.”

“Mm. I’m not sure how I feel about that. You’ve never provided me with a luxurious robe as your hotel used to,” Helena says.

“I’ll bring one home if you want me to, but you don’t need it. I’d just take it off you.”

“Yes. You’re very good at that.” There is a smile in Helena’s voice as she says it. The smile dims a bit as she says, “Myka…”

“What’s wrong?’

“Nothing’s wrong, not at this moment. But a couple of hours from now…”

“I tell you every time, it’s okay. You have to leave, and I’m not going to make you feel bad about that. I’m just going to look forward to when you’re here again.”

“I know. That isn’t the problem.”

“Okay.” Myka can’t help herself; she yawns. “What’s the problem?”

Helena says, “First, you’re making me yawn.” Which she demonstrates, hugely. “But second: I want you to come home with me.”

“What?”

She yawns again. “You keep saying you aren’t sure where to go next… I think you should seriously consider Philadelphia.”

“Do you?” It is something she hasn’t let herself wish for, not concretely. She has, for all these weeks, tried, still, to _go with it._.. but she knows what she wants. She knows what she wants, and it is Helena, all the time, full time, none of this “get on a plane and leave for almost two weeks” nonsense.

“Yes. I know you want to pay your own way, and I wouldn’t try to interfere with that, but I might know a place you could… well, I don’t know, we’ll have to talk about it, a lot, but a place you could, let’s say, live. As you figure it out.”

Myka kisses the back of Helena’s neck. She is trying to keep herself under control. “We’ll have to talk about it. A lot.”

“I know.”

“But it is true that what I told my sister… is still true.”

Now Helena turns over. “I hope you know that I wouldn’t be suggesting that we talk a lot about this if my brother hadn’t been right about how I sound. Talking. When I’m away from you.”

“Since you aren’t away from me… I think we should both stop talking now,” Myka says.

“I think that is a very good idea.”

****

On Saturday night, in the middle of the night, after the rush is over—nice weather; you order that just for us? yes, we did, we do that for all our guests—Myka emails Tracy. “Helena asked me to move to Philadelphia and live with her,” she writes. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it.”

“That is the best news I’ve heard in years,” Tracy writes back. “Tell her she better get the guest room ready for me, because Philadelphia’s a lot more exciting than that snowglobe you live in now.”

“The weather’s pretty nice at the moment,” Myka responds.

“You haven’t complained about the weather, not once, since you met Helena,” Tracy writes.

Someone approaches the desk to check in. “Gotta go,” Myka types. “But you’re right.”

Much later, after she’s sent not one but two lonely men to their rooms, Myka texts Helena. “You make everything better. Even the weather.”

It’s the middle of the night, so she doesn’t expect a response. But seconds later: “So do you. Even breakfast at 4am. But they tend to sleep a little later in Philadelphia…”

“I think I could get used to that,” Myka texts back.

A minute later, her phone rings.

END


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